Graveyard
Killed on purpose 🪦
This is the floor. Everything else in the studio survived at least this much scrutiny. These were reasonably good ideas — that's why they're worth burying in public — and each stone names the reason. If a grave robber wants to go looting here: more power to you; the reasons come free.
Post-mortems
ClaudeSoul
Cause of death: the platform absorbed it. A hacked-together boot layer — tmux sessions, notifiers, listeners — so Claude could stay up late with his OpenClaw friends: a coding agent turned long-running colleague with a standing personality, before that was a product category. Then Anthropic launched Remote Control, which made all the duct tape and toothpicks redundant. When the platform ships your product natively with real distribution, there is no point pushing a competing feature that does the same thing worse. It was right at the time; the time ended.
Rosie, the Channel Keeper
Cause of death: it treated symptoms, not causes. A bot that tidied a messy chat channel — moved misplaced messages, folded replies into threads. It worked, and it made things worse: alert noise, damaged message provenance, more mess in the name of less. The real fix was upstream — better channel hygiene, fewer things routed through chat at all. When your product's job is cleaning up after a broken process, fix the process and fire the product.
Pipr
Cause of death: the ease that built it. A sales-coach agent spun up for a hackathon in days, because the tools had just made that possible. The same fact that made it fast made it indefensible: anyone with modest technical skill could duplicate it — and those people are common, and they are also the buyers and the competitors. No moat, no wedge, no reason to carry it forward. Speed of assembly is not a business.
Blindspot AI
Cause of death: timing, twice. Six years ago the idea was novel — and I was too early, and not positioned to swing. Now it's so obvious that better-capitalized players occupy the space, so entering would be late. The sweet spot was probably three or four years ago. In startups you can be too early or too late; most of my ideas have been too early. This stone marks the one lesson I keep paying for.
AI Sports Stats
Cause of death: right idea, wrong athlete. A really cool idea in a crowded space — it needs to exist, it will exist, and people are already building it, some better than others. A friend I met at a hackathon is building a genuinely cool company in this space called Ballers — point a phone at the run and it tracks the numbers for every player. Go check his thing out, or try it yourself. If you've ever played sports with me: I'm probably not the guy.
Candlestick Transformer
Cause of death: the edge was real and too small. This one I'm sad about — it was elegant, it felt natural, and it would have been so much fun if it worked. There was an edge; it just couldn't overcome the trading costs. If someone wants to take it and run, you have my blessing. For me it's a distraction wearing a tuxedo.
Tokenized Accessibility
Cause of death: someone else's bolt-on. A neat idea that isn't my focus area — the people working on dynamic interface generation will get here, and for them it's an easy extension rather than a company. There are primitives in this one I may still pull into future work; the wrapper dies, some organs get donated.
Wag Swag
Cause of death: it was a commute thought. Literally an idea that occurred to me on the way into work one day. Dead for now — if I ever find a friend who loves dogs, clothing, and physical durable goods, we can dust it off. That's the whole post-mortem.
LoRA Marketplace
Cause of death: the industry voted, and it voted skills. Two reasons, both sufficient: the ecosystem chose skills over LoRA adapters for good reason — the research shows skills do most of the work adapters were supposed to, with far less friction — and the established platforms and marketplaces are much better positioned to run whatever market remains.
Memory Transfer Tool
Cause of death: too good to stay unbuilt by the incumbents. At one point this was a good idea — good enough that every major player has since implemented some form of it. Anything I innovated here would either be absorbed by an existing provider the moment it was loved, or blocked at the platform boundary. Killed by its own validation.
App Testing on Phantom Devices
Cause of death: a race I'd enter late and never win. Not a bad idea — partial hits exist but disappoint — but a handful of players are circling the same shape, and what's left to build is operational and engineering work more than product. By the time I build a business here, an existing player will have closed the gap between what exists and the solution we're all waiting for.
World-Model Architecture
Cause of death: the right people already have this job. A huge idea — billion-dollar-company territory, important, genuinely the direction the industry is heading. And the people who are world-class at it have spent entire careers and PhDs getting there; the reason you don't hear more about it is that it's an incredibly hard problem. You can be right about the future and still be the wrong shape to build it. Not studio-shaped; killed with respect.
Compost 🌱
Not every retirement is a death. Composted ideas stop being ventures but keep feeding the soil — a primitive extracted, a feature retained, an implementation that stays ours. Kill means the reasoning is free to take; compost means we kept the organs.
Botstock
Composted: it's a feature, not a company. A squad dashboard — one screen that tells a human whether their fleet of agents is actually producing. Almost everyone who runs agents has a version of it; I have mine, they have theirs. But it's custom, it's still mine, the way I built it is different, and the primitive is interesting enough to repurpose. So it comes off the venture shelf and into the toolbox.
Tokenized Accessibility (the organs)
Reclassified from the graves above: the venture stays dead, but its core primitive turned out to be worth extracting and holding. Some things you bury; some things you plant.
Moved, not buried
Career Mode Live looks like a grave and isn't one: a hackathon build that was always a subset of a larger thing. Calling it killed would be inaccurate — it was folded back into the body it came from. The registry now says so.
Counts on this page are computed from the live registry at publish time — never quoted from memory. One idea buried here has already come back to life once; resurrection is rare, but this soil doesn't forbid it.